In 1932 Vladimir Voinovich was born in Dushanbe, capital of the Tadzhik Republic, to a Jewish mother and a journalist father of Serbian descent. After receiving a rudimentary formal education and working at various trades, he became one of the Soviet Union's most daring voices, author of the satires entitled The Ivankiad and The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (see WLT 52:4, pp. 544-50). Voinovich's plain language and uncompromising directness reveal Soviet reality in its grotesque, dehumanizing aspects. He depicts the life of the small man, the alienated, the victim of both fate and the system. His work is imbued with a sadness over wasted human potential that is relieved by laughter at the absurd injustice of it all.

Putëm vzaimnoj perepiski (Via Mutual Correspondence) is divided into two sections, one composed of fiction and the other containing autobiographical stories and open letters. In the foreword, where he cites an example of the unfair criticism of his work, Voinovich is not completely open with his Western reader. It seems that A. Ivanov termed “pornographic” the song from Voinovich's Two Comrades that begins; “Mama, I love a pilot. / Mama, I shall marry him.” This seemingly innocent ditty, although not pornographic, is certainly suggestive, because it evokes in the Soviet mind an entire cycle of indecent častuški (couplets).

What I Might Have Been, originally published in Novyj Mir (no. 2, 1963), is the story that first brought Voinovich to official attention and set him on a path that led in 1974, after his open support of Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to his expulsion from the Writers Union. Zhenia Samokhin is a construction overseer, past his prime, who will never obtain security in life because of a stubborn sense of personal pride in his work. In refusing to hand over a new building prematurely, Samokhin forfeits a promotion and condemns himself to a wanderer's life. His is the dilemma of the lonely idealist caught in a maze of bureaucratic incompetency.

Other stories in this section deal with the death of an undistinguished man who preferred life in prison camps to daily village life, and a correspondence that ends in a serviceman's abandonment of dreams of future glory and his entrapment in an undesirable marriage. “A Circle of Friends” is a lively satire of Stalin and his henchmen. Their paranoia, servility, barbarism and incompetency are revealed. In the end Koba (Stalin) sees himself as a “superparasite,” killer and destroyer of the economy and army in the name of personal power. He is “the main enemy of the people,” a paranoid who hates even himself.

The second part of Voinovich's work includes stories about his life in a construction organization and in the military service as well as his daring “Open Letter to the President of VAAP,” “To the Secretariat of the Moscow Union of Writers” and “Top Secret,” his protest upon having his telephone disconnected after a conversation with a friend in Boston.